CNN’s Anderson Cooper by Diane Arbus

dd
As featured in last Friday’s New York Times (free registration required), there is a new retrospective of Diane Arbus’ spooky photography currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum after touring several other US cities. Baby-rearing blog DaddyTypes points out a centerpiece of that collection is a portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s infant son, Anderson Cooper. Yes, CNN’s own Anderson Cooper.
The portrait, shot for Harper’s Bazaar, is described in Patricia Bosworth’s Arbus biography:

“To dispel the growing myth that [Arbus] only took pictures of freaks, she made up a list of elegant people she wanted to photograph…As if to prove her point, she took a remarkable portrait of Gloria Vanderbilt’s sleeping baby son, Anderson Hays Cooper, for a Harper’s Bazaar Valentine issue. In this truly astonishing picture, the infant resembles a flat white death’s head — eyes sealed shut, moth pursed and moist with saliva. When Gloria Vanderbilt saw the photograph, she forbade Bazaar to publish it, but eventually she changed her mind and this stunning image opened Diane’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972.”

A current photo of Mr. Cooper can be found here.

5 thoughts on “CNN’s Anderson Cooper by Diane Arbus”

  1. This is a true masterpiece. It just goes to show that beneath it all, you can find a piece of the unordinary. Their is beauty in the weird and strange and this photo, along with so many others taken by this wonderful women show that.

Leave a Reply to Diana Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *